Bridger Beal-Cvetko is a reporter for KSL.com. He covers politics, Salt Lake County communities and breaking news. Bridger has worked for the Deseret News and graduated from Utah Valley University.
SALT LAKE CITY — A legislative redistricting meeting devolved into partisan bickering Wednesday, as Republicans and Democrats sought to paint experts retained by the other side as biased.The only two Democrats on the Legislative Redistricting Committee, Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla and Rep.
Doug Owens, presented a proposed congressional map of their own to add to the five maps commissioned by the GOP chairs of the committee earlier this week. This comes after a judge invalidated the state's current map, launching a hurried process to create a new one before next year's election.While presenting the new map to the committee, Owens, D-Millcreek, said Democrats "strongly suspect" that Sean Trende, the expert hired by the GOP committee chairs to draw the majority's proposals, incorporated partisan data into the process. That would be illegal under current redistricting law."We suspect there was a data set incorporated into the test that Dr. Trende applied, and we are unable to verify," Owens said. "It's as if we're told to buy a car, and we can't lift the hood and look."That remark upset Sen. Scott Sandall, R-Tremonton, one of the co-chairs of the committee."You just demeaned us," Sandall said loudly. "You just demeaned us to the public. … I will not have that. You called us somehow hiding or lying about everything that we've presented to say that our map, these maps, were not developed with any political data. You just misrepresented that, and that's out of order."Owens apologized and clarified he didn't think any committee member had knowledge of partisan data being used. Still, he and other Democrats have criticized the method by which Trende, a political analyst, planned to evaluate whether the maps unintentionally disfavor one political party.That wasn't the only heated part of Wednesday's hearing, which lasted more than three hours. Republicans on the committee then went after the Democrats' expert, political scientist Daniel Magleby, who was hired to help draw their map proposal.Rep. Cal Roberts, R-Draper, specifically criticized Magleby's personal background. Roberts brought up past social media posts from Magleby which "read like a left-wing activist." In one of those posts, on Nov. 10, 2021, Magleby commented about the maps Utah lawmakers enacted after the 2020 census."This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook," the tweet read. "Step 1: rig the system to syste
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